Free The Child Buyer by John Hersey Page A

two years ago in February, I was working at five a.m. in the biology lab at Wairy High, on a project on the caste system of termites—how a soldier termite can develop from a nymph that wouldn't normally become a soldier; in other words, the caste system isn't hereditary. Very instructive for us mortals. I usually work under a single hooded lamp in that big room, with slate tops on the big lab tables, and a sink at each end, and I concentrate pretty hard. It's as silent as King Tut's tomb in there; you could practically hear the queen termites laying their eggs. Well, that morning I heard a gentle stirring, and the edge of my mind thought, 'My God, I'm going to have to set me a mouse trap in here,' and a couple minutes later I looked up, and here was this pale circle of paste at the edge of the light with two of the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen in it, not looking at me but staring at my termites. I don't know to this day how that boy knew about my early-morning work, or how he contrived to get away from home at that hour. His home is in a tenement block on River Street, a quarter-mile from the school, and it was dead-o'-winter, and five in the morning. Anyway, he was just there, and he said, 'Mind if I watch, Dr. Gozar?' He came the next morning, and he had a piece of paper with a list of questions he wanted to ask me. Mind you, the child was only eight—fourth grade. He's been coming ever since. How I love that boy!
    Mr. BROADBENT. You think the man Wissey Jones was right, then, in selecting him for purchase?
    Dr. GOZAR. There's no child better. Barry combines drive and a keen, keen mind. He calls me Dr. Gozar, and I call him Mr. Rudd. I always call my high-school students 'Mr.' and 'Miss'— you see, besides being principal at Lincoln, I teach biology
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    THE CHILD BUYER
    courses in both of the Pequot high schools—and so I call Barry 'Mr./ too. He learns from me, and I learn from him. He doesn't mind showing his ignorance to me—why should I mind showing mine to him?
    Mr. BROADBENT. What else did you tell Mr. Jones?
    Dr. GOZAR. I told him the real reason Barry had been passed over in deary's stupid wizard hunt was that Barry isn't a stereo-typic Brain. lie's fat—
    Senator VOYOLKO. You told me that. The kid's fat.
    Dr. GOZAR. —but he doesn't have an enlarged head, or a pigeon chest, or spindly legs and floppy wrists, or crybaby eyes, lie doesn't even wear horn-rimmed glasses, or any glasses at all.
    Senator SKYPACK. You mean this little twerp is a boy's boy?
    Dr. GOZAR. Are you a man's man, Senator?
    Senator SKYPACK. You damn right.
    Dr. GOZAR. Well, these categories are beyond me, sir. All I'm saying is that Barry isn't the commonplace bespectacled Brain. He has a marvelous diffidence about him:
    'Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much; Wisdom is humble that he knows no more/
    Mr. BROADBENT. And did Mr. Jones get around to his proposition?
    Dr. GOZAR. Yes, he came to it, sir. Roundabout.
    Mr. BROADBENT. How do you mean, roundabout?
    Dr. GOZAR. He began by saying that what we need to relieve our talent shortage in this country is a crash program, and I told him I thought that was the worst possible thing you could do. The way they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the Manhattan Project to work up the atom bomb has a lot of people thinking that all you need to do to unlock supreme mysteries is to have an act of Congress, and empty Fort Knox, and start up a vast Federal agency—that money solves everything. We'll be having a crash program to locate God one of these days, pin
    down a definite location for His throne. But I told Jones you can't free talent with dollars. You can't package talent, you can't put it in uniform bottles and boxes with labels. Ability slips through the cogs of a machine; machines are only as bright as the men who feed them data. I don't want an IBM machine telling me which of my kids'll be a doctor, which a lawyer, which a beggarman, which a thief. I don't want these